'Black Season' at My White Middle School

When your history is so under-integrated into the mainstream, you fight to tell the essential parts in whatever space you can claim.

By
Baratunde Thurston

Jan 15, 2018

At my predominantly white middle and high school, there were several seasons: football season, volleyball season, track season, and black season. At home, a black household in a black neighborhood parented by an Afro-centric mother, it was always black season. The paintings of ankhs and black power fists on the wall, the sounds of Miriam Makeba on the stereo, the moving images of the "Cosby Show" and not "The Simpsons" on the television made the primacy of blackness very clear.

At school, though? Black season was more narrowly defined as the six weeks between Martin Luther King Jr. Day in mid-January and the end of Black History Month. Being black in this environment came with pressures: Are we speaking Ebonics or the Queen's English? Are we wearing Timbs or sneakers? Are we staging a sit-in to protest local manifestations of historic inequities or playing a game of pick-up basketball? And those moments revealed a deeper question: Are we representing ourselves as individuals or our entire people as a race?

As black students, we were also teachers.

During black season, all pretense of balance went out the window. It was a time to be unapologetically black. While other schools might have recognized the season with staid guest lecturers or posters of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior on the walls, we had our own traditions at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. We had the annual Black History Month musical. We used the arts to educate, communicate, and humble brag on our people.

Leading this effort, we had a real-life musical genius, the middle school music director, Rickey Payton, Sr. The first time I walked into his music room was to audition for the Black History Month show as a new seventh grade student. Before I could even introduce myself, I faced a wall filled with photos of Mr. Payton and a who’s who of famous black musicians: Ray Charles, Patti LaBelle, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and the not-black-but-loved-being-called-that Bill Clinton.

I don't remember what I sang in my audition, but I got in — Mr. Payton didn't turn anyone away. The Black History Month show was the only school production involving students from both the middle and upper schools. Even the cool kids were in it, from star athletes to political poet types. There wasn’t any pressure from white students about us being in this show. If anything, the bigger scandal was to not be in the show (a way bigger deal than not sitting with the black kids in the cafeteria). In fact, when I called up a high school friend, he reminded me that Mr. Payton made sure everyone was in this production. "I remember feeling more social pressure about not being in the show from the black community than worrying about what white people thought," he told me.

When your history is so under-integrated into the mainstream, you fight to tell the essential parts in whatever space you can claim.

The music of Mr. Payton was accompanied by a script developed by some of the black parents, including a Howard University professor. Mrs. Cummings was no joke. She attended just about every rehearsal, likely to make sure her two sons didn’t act too much the fool, and to make sure that our school wasn’t adding to the miseducation of us negroes by oversimplifying our history. She was a values chaperone, a helicopter parent in defense of wokeness.

These shows spanned the entirety of known black history. We referenced African kingdoms, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and George Washington Carver's peanuts, and Madame CJ Walker's straightening comb; plus African drumming, stepping, gospel music, and the role of phenomenal black women. We got the whole school singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing." We even had white students in the show, and it takes a special type of open-minded, compassionate white person to play the role of a slavemaster and pretend-whip on some black kids at a Quaker school. (Thank you for your service, Alex. None of us are surprised you became a social worker.)

It’s nearly impossible to find a black kid in a predominantly white school who is unfamiliar with the idea of speaking for the race during a Huck Finn Moment in English class.

But something about being on stage, under literal spotlights, also highlighted the pressures of the metaphorical spotlight we existed under as roughly 15 percent of the school population. When Dr. King sets the bar, it's hard to justify wildin’ out and just being a kid. The pressure to always put the best foot forward — our own tiny contribution to the black freedom movement — also held us captive to something less than a full childhood. It was our responsibility to make sure that our peers knew that an HBCU wasn’t an H&R Block for black folks. As students, we were also teachers. We just weren’t on the faculty payroll.

It’s nearly impossible to find a black kid in a predominantly white school who is unfamiliar with the idea of speaking for the race during a Huck Finn Moment in English class, or a Nat Turner Moment in American history. We survivors all have our stories of fatigue and indignation at the moments when something black would emerge in the classroom and white kids’ heads swiveled in our direction in unison, expecting us to pick up the narration. That same friend I called up to fact check my memories reminded me of another truth: "We always did know the answer and had something to say. The head swivel was valid. We just didn’t control it. But in the Black History Month show, we got to control the narrative."

Looking back from the distance of over 20 years, I appreciate that we had the opportunity to control the narrative during a time of year that so often has people telling us what our history is, who mattered most, and what "achievements" were safe to celebrate. The best way to honor history is to let people tell their own. Happy Black Season, everyone. May we celebrate it every day.

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated host who has told jokes professionally on five continents, worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and cleaned bathrooms to pay for his Harvard education. He wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black.

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